Monday, September 28, 2015
I forgot to mention the one very odd thing about our hotel
room yesterday. I guess because I didn’t take a shower until this morning.
There is a large glass window serving as the wall between the bathtub/shower
and the bedroom. You can see right out the room and outdoors. There are
miniblinds on the the window but they work from the bed side of the glass not
from the wet and naked side. You have to plan ahead! Yikes!a
So, today we were up at 6:30am again. I don’t know what Clay
was thinking other than he had gone to sleep about 7:30pm last night. When I
was turning off my light to go to sleep at 20 of 10pm last night he got up and
asked me the time. When I told him, he laughed and said he thought it was time
to get up. Well I guess when you go to sleep right after sunset! So, we missed
the crowd at the breakfast buffet in good news. It was a little weird they had
noodles with bacon and onions for breakfast. Of course, they had other normal
stuff too so it was fine. Again, for a major capital city and centrally located
at this price, it is a fantastic value and more than fine. We headed out a
little before 9am to wait for the Big Bus at the stop around the corner across
from Keleti station for the first arrival at 9:15am. Clay bought our tickets
from the reception desk at the hotel for 7500 HUF pp. The tickets are good for
2 days and include a HOHO bus route, a HOHO boat route, 2 walking tours and a
night bus route and a night boat route. Since our upcoming cruise has a night
cruise the first night we’ll probably skip this one. We still haven’t ridden the
full HOHO day route. We took the Pest side walking tour, visited St. Stephen’s
basilica and saw the black Madonna and the relic hand of St. Stephen, then we
had lunch. We had local stuff. We had a bowl of goulash, a bowl of sausage bean
soup, a Dreher beer and a Tokaji wine. After we walked over to one of the many
chimney cake stands we had seen and I had a cinnamon one and Clay had a yummy
messy chocolate one. The wine must have been a mistake. I had the rest of the day
planned to the minute. We would cross to Buda and take the walking tour, cross
back to Pest and go to the 5pm organ concert in St. Stephen’s, have a quick
dinner and then take either the bus or boat night route. I got lost (I don’t
know what Clay’s excuse is) like I do in Cary once we crossed the Danube. I
just couldn’t get my bearings again until we got well away from the Danube and
nearer the hotel! So, we missed the Buda walking tour. We made the concert and I
really enjoyed it and was glad we had paid to enter earlier in the day because the
side chapels with the relic and Madonna painting were both closed when we paid
to enter again at 5pm. But, I got very tired and sore and cranky during that
hour and just wanted to go back and go to bed while Clay was expecting a big
meal and then he wanted to go to bed. We both wanted to find a Hungarian place and
had an unexpectedly hard time. We could have gone back to the lunch place right
by the basilica but didn’t want to repeat. When we finally went to the Bistro
at Gerbeaud I was just exhausted and knew they didn’t have anything on the menu
I wanted to eat except maybe goulash again and I didn’t really want that. They
had chicken legs paprika with gnocchi. I asked for just gnocchi and got a bowl
of what we would both call spaetzle. That was fine. I like it. Clay got a twice
cooked ham hock with lentils, sauerkraut and a sausage that was very close to
his all-time favorite pork dish from Vienna in 2003. As I recall that was
called a pork knuckle but it looked like tonight’s ham hock He didn’t think
this was quite as good, but a close second and much less expensive than that
meal was. So, a win for him and for me since it was more than he could eat and he
gave me half his sausage so I had a full meal! We skipped dessert. We stopped
at a couple of drugstores trying to find some good bandaids that will stay on
my blistered toes without causing more blisters! We also stopped at Hard Rock Café.
I forgot that earlier we stopped at Starbucks and got me a Budapest mug. It has
Parliament and the Chain Bridge on it. So anyway, it seems like no rest for the
weary. Even once we have gotten on our own, we haven’t let up the pace.
Tomorrow we need to make the most of what’s left on our Big Bus and transit
passes. Wednesday Clay has us booked for a 3 hour Segway tour. Thursday at 11am
we have to be checked out of this hotel and at 3pm cabins should be ready on
Amadeus Silver II. I should warn that they warn their Internet access is by satellite and slow and unreliable. So it is not clear that we'll be able to keep up with real time posts!
